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Linux Storage Stack

Stacking Up

Conclusions

The Linux Storage Stack implements all the requirements needed by an operating system to address current storage hardware. The modular design with well-defined interfaces ensures that the kernel developers can continue to develop and improve individual parts independently. This is also reflected in the new blk-mq, which will gradually take over from the previous I/O scheduler to address high-performance flash memory.

Specifically, the kernel developers are planning blk-mq support for the device mapper multipath driver (dm-multipath ), I/O scheduler support in the blk-mq layer, and scsi-mq/blk-mq support for iSCSI and FC HBA drivers [3] in the next kernel versions.

Infos

  1. Bjørling, Matias, Jens Axboe, David Nellans, and Philippe Bonnet. Linux Block I/O: Introducing Multi-Queue SSD Access on Multi-Core Systems. SYSTOR 2013. 6th International Systems and Storage Conference (The Technion, Haifa, Israel, June 30-July 2, 2013), http://kernel.dk/systor13-final18.pdf
  2. Hellwig, Christoph. Git Commit to Linux Kernel 3.17: scsi: add support for a blk-mq based I/O path, July 2014: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d285203cf647d7c97db3a1c33794315c9008593f
  3. Van Assche, Bart. Increasing SCSI LLD Driver Performance by Using the SCSI Multiqueue Approach, March 11, 2015: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/Vault%20-%20scsi-mq%20v2.pdf

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